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Notes -
Your Quarterly Ukraine War check-in
Three and a half months ago, we checked in on the war in Ukraine. That post was itself a check in to follow up on dire predictions from the pro-Russia posters in fall of 2025 that the loss of Pokrovsk was heralding the collapse of Ukrainian front lines and encirclement of Ukrainian troops. Amusingly, @No_one went back and deleted all of their posts after the last check in, so I can only leave you with this:
I expected the Iran war to be a major tailwind for Russia (oil prices, sanctions relief, US distraction) but on the contrary, the western information space seems to argue that things will remain stalemated for the foreseeable future. Ukraine seems to be pumping out drones (is this all that matters now?), and has started hitting Russian oil refineries. People have been hyping up what seems to be a mostly symbolic bombing of Moscow. The map hasn't moved, supposedly Russian recruitment is down. The Russian spring offensive has been underway for several weeks and made no progress:
On the flip side, people write articles about how bad the Russian economy is, and then drop this line near the end:
I'd be interested to hear whether anyone has insight into the rhetoric on the Russian side or the pro-Russian perspective at the moment.
So - any new/modified predictions? We had @ABigGuy4U saying collapse in July-August (still a few months to go), @Lizzardspawn saying to look at the frequency of blackouts in Kiev (still unchanged at 6-8 hours a day afaict).
Well that is indeed amusing! I was looking forward to Mr. "Majestic Capeshit Arc" having to come up with excuses when his theories almost certainly failed to pan out. Unfortunately it seems his disappearance has more to do with getting modded by Amadan and deleting his posts out of spite or not wanting anyone to follow him to wherever he goes next or whatever. Amadan does a lot of uncontroversially decent modding, but also blatantly violates at least the spirit of the rules often himself, especially that "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary" bit. I've been more than a little skeptical of at least some of his modding decisions, so it's unfortunate to see No_one who should be here eating humble pie instead get taken out by something unrelated. Alas...
Ukraine is seeing a bit of a PR boom going their way right now, and as someone who's pro-Western I've been enjoying that a bit. But as anyone who's followed this war for long knows, that type of thing tends to happen in cycles. We're in a good cycle for Ukraine right now, but I wouldn't herald it as anything more than a temporary upswing. As always, Perun has probably the best take in that there's indeed some reasons for genuine optimism, but it's simultaneously not worth getting ahead of ourselves.
No_One would never have eaten humble pie. The reason I started posting on this forum was seeing No_ones post about stealth and radars that is cribbed straight from anti-US pro-russian slop about how X band radar reflecting off mountains or clouds can defeat frontal stealth and how IRST proves US stealth is inferior so Russia wins automatically. His responses involved special pleading of "you and i aren't privy to the inner workings of UAC AS the technology is secret so thats how we know it works" type of wishful thinking. Its pure cope straight out of ArmchariWarlord or BigSerge except without the tells of self-insert heroism or dour prose that makes those idiots at least amusing to read. No_ones takes were pure regurgitations of the lowest effort leavings of NCD without the courtesy of logical follow through supposedly the standard of this board or at least being amusingly wrong which is the standard of the internet.
As for the Ukraine war itself, the slow grind out past Pokrovsk just shows the incapability of the Russians to keep goals realistic. They were supposed to break out and lay siege to Kramatorsk after fucking Popasna 3 years ago, and since then its been a steady stream of small towns taken and then slowly meatgrinding forward. Theres alot of Russian meat but also alot of Ukrainian land, with Kramatorsk having multiple clear resupply from the west easily unlike the smaller satellites towns which had a single viable resupply line that if cut off resulted in withdrawal.
Sometime around 2024 the Ukraine war reached the trough of grinding where individual town blocks and 150 person villages were treated as magnificent gains by the Russians. Every fucking Z(slur) acted like this was finally the moment of their ascension and then moved the goalposts when Nothing Ever Happened. Its two old stupid soviet armies slogging each other past the tenth round and neither really understands a strategy to unfuck themselves but also can't take time to figure out how to unfuck themselves. Ukraine 2026 PR boosting is as much an artifact of real successes as much as the Russians reaching effective exhaustion due to lacking any viable doctrine for exploitation.
I will almost miss his favorite conspiracy theory about Euromaidan, which hinged on false-flag protestors shooting into the crowd to turn the crowd against the police, which was coupled with his most adamant refusal that there was no way the Ukrainian security state opposed to the protestors would ever be the ones managing those false-flag attacks in order to provide the police a pretext for the crackdown the security state had been lobbying for (because no nationalist would ever do such a thing, donchaknow).
Its just tired pro-Z bullshit that insists the west is the big bad conspirator funding colour revolutions and that actually everyone would be happy to live under any autocrats thumb so long as the west is opposed. What always amusing is that the vatnik brigades are WORDS WORDS WORDS with reams of photos and pointing arrows and histories and obscure engineering diagrams that all sound authoritative until a reader notices something doesn't add up and then a mild review shows literally every assumption rests on an insane assumption. The single phone call of Nuland saying Yushenko was "our guy" as if he was a deliberate CIA plant as opposed to simply a guy that made the calculus on his own recognizance that the Russian puppet brigade was doing a terrible job and he himself wouldn't have had access to that circle so to the other guy we go. Yet a single leak was taken as proof of western perfidy, a narrative repeated TILL NOW in vatnik circles that Ukraine actually really wants to join the motherland and the Azov NAFO fascists are suppressing the will of the people.
I get the anti USA animus can manifest in many ways and the totalizing presence of the USA means every axis is a pair of dynamics to flagplant on but like have an original thought please. Textdumping pages of conspiratard shit is for the heyday of tumblr and at least there was interesting porn adjacent to the weirdo walls of crazy.
I'm surprised by how popular this view is here on The Motte, either as-is or as a lite version where it's not directly stated but heavily implied. I could understand Russians saying that but seeing people who are clearly Americans based on their other comments embrace it is just so weird.
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twenty-seven 8x10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one…
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